Since 2008, an independent look at challenges and opportunities in sports and financial investing, with occasional diversions as my mood takes me. Nothing is for sale, and this not a Profit and Loss report either. They're boring.

Friday, 4 March 2016

Congratulations to Fizzer555 for being the first to take the "Home Improvement" project one step further - the 'Shorties' clue in the post just made it too easy:

When the team is at Home...

Even though the wins now exceed the losses, the system is still not quite profitable (-6.76 points, ROI -0.8%), but was a winner in both 2014 and 2015. Worth a closer look in my opinion. Thanks Baz.If you select only Home Favourites that helps further. I guess if a team is being made fav after two losses at home to the same opponent then you are picking up on teams with more ability and filtering out the weaker teams.

Yes, the Home and Favourite qualifiers make a huge difference to Baz's basic idea. Here's the ten year record:

Just two losing seasons in the past ten years, and only one (2013) that would have hurt, this is worthy of inclusion in the Cassini Portfolio. It's another very manageable, quick and simple strategy that will generate around 100 bets on the season, approximately one every couple of days (it's a long season).Now I just need a catchy name, to thank Baz and Fizzer555, and hope that anyone reading this forgets all about it and doesn't cause the prices to crash! It's again worth noting that the numbers above are all beatable on the exchanges or Pinnacle Sports but an ROI of 4.8% over ten years is very impressive.There's one more logical constraint that historically would have increased the profits to 64.89 points from 537 bets, an ROI% of 8.3%. Baz / Fizzer: email me if you can't figure it out.With many baseball series actually comprised of four games, I did look at the same strategy for teams losing the first three games. It's a rarer occurrence of course, and 93 bets over 10 seasons isn't much to get excited about, and neither is the loss of 15.48 points.

About Me

I have had a life-long interest in sports and after studying Pure Mathematics with Statistics at secondary school, have been fascinated by odds and probability.
The first system I came up with was a simple one - back the favourite and double up after a loss until a winner. Simple enough in theory, and I told my Dad about it. Not being a betting man himself, he ran it by some of his colleagues, and came home to tell me that it wouldn’t work because a long losing run would mean that the bank would be empty. Then there was always the possibility that the winner would be returned at odds-on, meaning that the total returns would not match the outlay. Not what a ten year old wants to hear! Only slightly daunted, I then went on a search for the Holy Grail, the secret to riches that I knew was out there somewhere. Finally in 2004 I stumbled across an article about Betting Exchanges and four years on I am able to make a steady profit. I am at that age where I can start thinking about retirement and anything I make from trading sports will bring that day forward.